Moe Brooker: From the Soul

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Philadelphia artist Moe Brooker is a renowned abstract painter whose multi-faceted career as an artist, educator, and arts advocate has spanned more than 50 years. He began his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later attended Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Initially, Brooker was a figure painter who became intrigued by the ability to visually communicate through abstraction. Rather than re-creating a particular space or scene, Brooker became interested in creating his own sense of place and time, his own expression of space where colors, lines, patterns, and textures overlap and merge into unified compositions. Always vibrant and energetic, his paintings burst with color like celebratory cosmic explosions.

Brooker is a master at his craft where every color combination, mark, and pattern is deliberate. In 2006, Philadelphia art critic Roberta Fallon wrote of Brooker's work, "The paintings grow from the artist's intent as well as from his intuition. They are made by a series of considered decisions fueled by issues of color, line and composition. While they are not impulsive works, they have moments of spontaneous combustion in which mind and hand work together subconsciously to spark a passage of perfect grace like a painted prayer."